Inspired by Planet Money’s Pick A Number contest, and buoyed by a story about how NCTM President Mike Shaughnessy recently used my favorite game with a group of students at Albuquerque Academy, I’ve decided to conduct an online experiment using a Google Docs form.

If you’ve got a minute and are willing to participate, read on.

The rules for my favorite game are as follows:

On a piece of paper, everyone playing writes down a positive integer.

Show your number to a neighbor (for verification purposes only).

The winner is the person who wrote down the smallest integer not written by anyone else.

In order for this psychological math strategy game to be any fun, you need one important piece of information — how many people are playing. If played as a solitaire game, you should win every time. But if played with a group of 50, well, some real thought will need to go into your choice. Consequently, I’m going to limit the game to 100 players. (Well, sort of. What I’m actually gonna do is break the total number of responses into groups of 100, and I’ll consider each set as a separate game. So it’s not exactly the same, but this should allow you to play using the same strategy as if you were playing with just 99 other people.)

For this online version, the second step of the rules — show your number to a neighbor — is unnecessary. So all you need to do to play is enter your number. (I’ve also asked for your name and email address, too, just so I can give you proper credit and contact you if you win. But those are optional. If you do supply your email address, cross my heart, there will be no spam or third‑party solicitations.)

[Update] This game was originally run for one week, Nov 28 – Dec 5, 2011. The results of that initial trial (based on 1,042 entries) are available at the link given below. That said, I see no reason to prevent others from participating and, from time to time, I will update the results page to reflect new data.

I recently read a conference proposal in which the potential presenter declared, “PEMDAS must die!” Upon reading this, I thought, “Hear, hear!” But then the potential presenter claimed, “We should use GEMDAS instead!” Really? Does this presenter honestly believe that changing P (parentheses) to G (grouping) is sufficient to eliminate all the problems students have with order of operations?

I have heard that some teachers use GEMS, where M stands for both multiplication and division and S stands for both subtraction and addition. That eliminates the problem some students have, thinking that multiplication has to happen before division or that addition has to happen before subtraction.

Whatever. From my experience, most of the trouble students have with PEMDAS, GEMDAS, or GEMS typically results from a failure to consider it at all when working with a complex expression. It isn’t the mnemonic.

Here’s a mnemonic for remembering what a mnemonic is: Think about a person with a terrible memory who previously suffered an inflammatory lung condition. Imagine that he often makes up catchy little phrases to help him remember things. Then you can make the association of pneumonic with mnemonic, and you won’t have any more trouble. There, now… isn’t that simple?

π (3,835 digits)
In 1995, Mike Keith wrote a poem called Poe, E., Near A Raven, which gave the first 740 digits of π (the number of letters in each word indicates the value for that digit of π). It was based on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven. But some people are never satisfied, so he later wrote the Cadaeic Cadenza, which gives the first 3,835 digits of π.

My life is pretty good. I mean, sure, I wish I were better at Scrabble®, or a little smarter, or a little faster, or a lot better looking. But don’t we all? Overall, I really can’t complain.

For instance, I get to write a blog about math jokes, I get to do math every day for a living, and I know that the proper amount of time t, in minutes, to cook a turkey is given by the formula t = 38 × w2/3, where w is the weight of the turkey in pounds. And all of that is pretty cool.

I’ve not been as happy lately as I probably should be. Thanksgiving seems like the right day to reverse that pattern and recount all the things in life for which a math geek like I should be grateful. Feel free to let me know what you’re grateful for, too.

For twin sons who love math almost as much as their daddy

For my sons getting so excited that they speak faster than I can possibly understand (especially when they’re excited about math)

For a wife who’s willing to tolerate a schlub like me, and who makes it very easy to keep loving her

For grocery store tiles of the perfect size, so that your natural stride length perfectly aligns with light and dark squares

For the wonderful safety of numbers

For getting lost in a challenging problem

For going to bed with a challenging problem, and waking up with the solution

The following story was told to me by Judy White, one of the world’s greatest middle school teachers.

Using wooden cubes, Judy created a set of double stairs. As illustrated below, 2 cubes were required to create 1 step (green), 6 cubes were required to create 2 steps (green and red), and 12 cubes were required to create 3 steps (green, red, and blue).

Judy asked her students how many cubes would be required to create 4 steps, 5 steps, and 6 steps. With a little discussion, her students agreed that 20 cubes, 30 cubes, and 42 cubes would be needed, respectively.

She then asked them to generalize. “Do you see a pattern for how many cubes would be needed to create n steps?” she asked.

One boy responded, “No.”

“There isn’t a pattern?” Judy asked.

“No, Mrs. White,” the boy said, “the answer is no — n × o.”

Not well versed in algebraic notation, the boy used the letter o instead of n + 1.

How great is that?

Speaking of stairs, here’s a math joke involving stairs.

A statistician, a physicist, and an engineer die on the same day. At the Pearly Gates, they are greeted by St. Peter. “To enter Heaven,” he tells them, “you must climb these 1,000 stairs. But while you are climbing, I will read to you from Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks. If you can make it to the top without laughing, you may enter.”

They start up the stairs. The statistician laughs when he reaches the 47th step. The physicist reaches the 125th step, but he then laughs, too. The engineer, however, makes it all the way to the top.

What’s the best name ever? My vote goes to an Army Reservist whose name — and I’m not making this up; you can find documentation here — is

Staff Sergeant Max Fightmaster

If names truly imply destiny, then this guy was born to be a tough-as-nails sergeant.

A close second is Moxie Crimefighter Jillette, daughter of comedian Penn Jillette. One can only hope that she grows up to be a superhero.

These names got me to thinking: What are the best names in the math world? The math equivalent to Staff Sergeant Max Fightmaster would be Algebra von Calculus. Alas, no real person has ever borne the burden of that name. But with multiple thousands of mathematicians since the beginning of time, there have got to be a few gems in there, right? Indeed. Here’s my dirty baker’s dozen.

1. August Beer – Are you kidding me? My favorite month and my favorite libation? Honestly, this name could only be bested by Ultimate Frisbee Copulation, and no mathematician with that name has yet walked the Earth.

2. Weinan E – To my knowledge, the only mathematician with a single-letter last name.

3. Walcher of Malvern – If things didn’t work out with mathematics, he was ready to be a fearless knight.

4. Srinivasa Ramanujan – It just rolls off the tongue so effortlessly.

5. Jon Barwise – True to his name, his best work was done on beer-stained napkins.

6. Helmut Ulm – The letters in his last name are a subset of the letters in his first name. How cool is that?

7. John Viriamu Jones – The inclusion of Viriamu, which is the Erromangan translation of Williams, makes extraordinary this otherwise very ordinary Welsh name.

8. Ken Ono – Six letters total, and the last name is a palindrome that also means delicious (Hawaiian), is the alternative name for Wahoo (fish), and is an acronym for “Or Nearest Offer.”

9. Udny Yule – Why it’s cool defies description. It just is.

10. Brian Pink – Not many mathy folks can pull off this color, but the Australia Statistician wears his name without shame.

11. Nate Silver – A good name, but he gets bonus points for having a cool title: psephologist (elections analyst). And double bonus points for his statement, “It’s always more interesting to apply [numbers] to batting averages than algebra class.”

12. Chike Obi – First sub-Saharan African to hold a doctorate in mathematics.

Morris DeGroot – Sounds like a comic book character, and it has perfect cadence.

W. B. R. Lickorish – Three initials, and his last name is a popular treat.

Alicia Boole Stott – She got her middle name from her father George, who was no slacker in the math world. Then she married an actuary whose last name has a consonant repeated three times. But to ensure that her name didn’t overpower her brilliance, she coined the term polytope. Nicely done, Alicia.

“I know,” he replied, “and it’s supposed to be twice as cold tomorrow!”

A sentiment shared by too many students…

Mother: Did you learn a lot in school today?

Son: Apparently not! I have to go back tomorrow!

If only this didn’t seem so believable…

Teacher: Tomorrow, Dr. Feynman is giving a lecture on Saturn, and everyone must attend.

Student: Wow, can you get there in just one day?

Ever have a professor like this?

When the student went to his logic professor for help, she replied, “Come back tomorrow.” The student returned the next day and was given the same instructions. The student returned every day, and every day he was told, “Come back tomorrow.”

Finally, the professor lost her patience. “This is outrageous!” she said to the student. “Don’t you understand simple language? I keep telling you to come tomorrow, yet you insist on coming today!”

About MJ4MF

The Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks blog is an online extension to the book Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks. The blog contains jokes submitted by readers, new jokes discovered by the author, details about speaking appearances and workshops, and other random bits of information that might be interesting to the strange folks who like math jokes.